The Night Before Christmas (1951 film)
1951 film
The Night Before Christmas (Russian: Ночь пе́ред Рождество́м, Noch pered Rozhdestvom) is a 1951 Russian animated feature film directed by the "grandmothers of the Russian animation", Brumberg sisters, and produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow. The film is based on Nikolai Gogol's 1832 story "The Night Before Christmas".
The animation features heavy use of rotoscoping, known as "Éclair" in the Soviet Union, and is an example of the Socialist-Realist period in Russian animation. The film is in the public domain in Russia and is widely available on numerous Home video and DVD releases, mostly along with other films.
Plot
Action of the animated film happens in Dykanka, in Ukraine. Noticed by nobody, in the sky two are turned: the witch on a sweeper which gathers stars in a sleeve, and the devil who hides moon in a pocket, thinking that the come darkness will keep houses of the rich Cossack the Chub invited to the clerk on kutia and hated to the devil the smith Vakula (who painted a picture of the Last Judgement and the devil on a church wall) won't dare to come to the Chub's daughter Oksana.
The forelock with the godfather isn't known whether to go in such darkness to the clerk, however decide and left. The beauty Oksana stays at home. Vakula comes, but Oksana urges on him. The gone astray Forelock, without godfather, decided to come back home because of the blizzard arranged with the devil knocks at the door.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Night Before Christmas (1951 film)” as 1951 film. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1951 film. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7754064. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951 and 1832.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Night Before Christmas (1951 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.